Introducing the Articles API

The USA TODAY Developer Team is excited to announce to launch of our Articles API, which offers developers a more robust way to construct feeds of USA TODAY story content.

Using the API, you can construct feeds in several ways, including pulling editorially-prioritized content by section, using basic search or tag search, or calling feeds from one of the USA TODAY communities. In fact, we are the biggest user of this API. It has proved vital to powering many of our programs behind the scenes, such as our iPad and Google Chrome applications.

Before building the Articles API, we used a tangle of systems and databases to offer feeds to partners. We realized we needed a better solution and built a database that consolidates stories as well as an API Engine that could deliver the stories in various formats. The database contains all web stories going back to 2004, as well as blog posts, newspaper stories, and even wire feeds.

The API engine is modular and extensible, and it will grow as new requirements emerge. It has three types of modules: Retrievers, Formatters and Encoders. The retrievers pull data from the database in different ways. For example:

• The top stories retrievers return the stories that are currently on our front pages. The search retriever combines data from our internal Google search appliance with a database search, while the tag retriever will return stories by pre-defined tags.

• The formatters transform the stories in a variety of formats used internally and by our partners. We have a proprietary XML data format for internal use, and also serve NewsML and NITF full text formats to approved 3^rd parties. Our RSS format is available to all public users.

• The encoders produce the feed in JSON formats that work best with jQuery, as well as XML and Javascript formats.

Our new Articles API uses just a portion of the power of our API engine to provide stories in RSS format. If this proves popular, we hope to provide other types of feeds from the API. For example, we could provide an mrss feed that would include photos and videos, or even a full text feed that would allow developers to display our full stories in new ways.

Head over to our Developer Portal to read our documentation and sign up for a key. Please let us know what you like or dislike by posting in our forum or sending us an e-mail. We welcome your feedback. Happy coding!